It's no exaggeration to say that Marvel is one of the most prolific and successful entertainment
companies in the world. But it hasn't always been that way — and over the years, the
biggest name in comics has produced some truly spectacular duds. These are Marvel's biggest
failures.
In 1978, Marvel was riding high off the success of its Incredible Hulk TV series. The time
seemed right for a whole Marvel TV universe, and in another world, the Dr. Strange pilot
movie might well have kicked it off.
Watching it now, however, it's easy to see why that never happened. The filmmakers seem
to have read Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's classic comics and then decided to make them as boring
as possible. Instead of going to a distant Himalayan sanctuary to learn the mystic arts,
Stephen Strange meets up with some old guy who lives in New York. And, rather than being
the daughter of an extra-dimensional warlord, his love interest, Clea, is just a regular
old college student.
Even if Dr. Strange had gone to series, it's hard to imagine anyone would still watch it
today. Everyone in this movie seems to be in a contest to see who can have the worst
hair, while Strange himself wears more gold chains than Mr. T.
Unsurprisingly, the disco soundtrack hasn't aged any better, and neither have the so-called
"magic" effects. One scene, in which Strange travels to the astral plane, looks like it
should have been projected on the wall of a hippie nightclub a decade earlier. Overall,
only one thing in the Dr. Strange pilot has actually aged well: an appearance by future
Arrested Development icon Jessica Walter as the evil Morgan LeFay.
"Good for her!"
Adapting a Marvel comic book seems like a can't-miss proposition. You've got the characters
all laid out for you, a built-in audience, and decades' worth of stories ripe for adaptation.
But the producers of many of these movies seem to think what fans really love about
comics is the names — because that's about all that made it into 1979's Captain America
and its follow-up, Death Too Soon.
The hero is still a military vet named Steve Rogers, but that's where the resemblance to
the comic books comes to an end. Instead of doggedly trying to enlist to fight the fascists,
Rogers just wants to drive around and discover himself. And while it's never easy for a flesh-and-blood
actor to pull off Cap's over-the-top getup, it's hard to imagine a faithful adaptation
looking any worse than the ridiculous outfit Steve dons for the end of the first movie
and the rest of the second. No wonder they keep it off-screen so long. It's also kinda
hard to get viewers excited when the cast all sound so damn bored — including Reb
Brown as Cap himself. Put it this way: it's not exactly The Winter Soldier.
In 1990, the head honchos over at Marvel pulled up their socks, wiped away their tears, and
gave Captain America another go. And... it was terrible. While the '70s TV movie had
drastically altered Cap's suit, this time, the project suffered from the opposite problem.
Director Albert Pyun later said:
"I petitioned them over and over to let me adjust the Captain America costume, but [...] they
were adamant it had to be the one in the comic."
What looks good on the page doesn't look good on the screen, however, and certainly not
on a budget. As a result, poor Cap was saddled with this wrinkly, rubbery mess. Bizarrely,
inside that suit is Matt Salinger, son of the famously reclusive Catcher in the Rye
author J.D. Salinger. The script doesn't do him any favors either, putting him in the
role of a superhero who never actually seems to win a fight.
He even loses during his first time out in World War II, when his enemy the Red Skull
straps him to a missile aimed at the White House. But hey, at least Cap manages to steer
it to a harmless landing in the Arctic Ocean, which is mostly impressive in that it makes
absolutely no sense.
Captain America was the work of Israeli-American super-schlockmaster Menahem Golan, so nonsense
is par for the course. This was one of the first movies he made after the collapse of
his Cannon Film Group. Given that this was how he chose to start his new venture at 21st
Century Films, well, you can guess how long that lasted.
The Fantastic Four may be one of the most beloved teams in Marvel comic books and ushered
in the Marvel Age, but they haven't had half as much luck in the movies. In the '90s, producer
Bernd Eichinger was about to lose his rights to the characters, and he needed a quick,
cheap movie to keep them from expiring. So he went to a man who knew quick and cheap
— B-movie maestro Roger Corman. The crew didn't realize they'd signed on for a corporate
write-off, though, and they took it all dead seriously.
Despite their efforts, this is an action movie so cheap that it goes an hour without an action
sequence, and when we finally get one, it's about as underwhelming as you could possibly
imagine. The Human Torch appears as a sub-bowling alley CGI creation, and they couldn't even
make Mr. Fantastic's graying temples look real. And then it all ends like this.
Unsurprisingly, the movie never got an official release, but the joke's on Eichinger — as
he still lost the rights. But hey, it could have been worse.
"It's fantastic." "Say that again."
Before Samuel L. Jackson put on Nick Fury's eyepatch, the role belonged to Baywatch beefcake
David Hasselhoff. In fact, Hasselhoff claims Stan Lee himself called him "the ultimate
Nick Fury" — though the fans apparently disagreed, since his feature-length pilot
never got a full series.
This makes Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD a deeply strange viewing experience. It opens with
armed goons stealing the frozen body of HYDRA founder Baron von Strucker, but he's not actually
thawed out until the very end of the movie. Instead, the plot focuses on Strucker's daughter,
who plans to overthrow the world's governments with the so-called "Death's Head" virus. This
forces SHIELD to recruit their former director, who they find whaling away at a concrete wall
in a mine shaft for reasons we may never understand.
There are also some hilarious special effects on show here, including a Helicarrier that
they somehow managed to make even more comic-booky than the comic book, supported on what look
like table legs connected to skyscraper-sized jet engines. And then there's this robot dude,
who inexplicably lights up his eyes and wide-open mouth as a kind of living movie projector
to deliver Strucker's message. So what did the later Fury think of all this? Speaking
about his preparations for the role in an interview, Jackson said:
"I watched David Hasselhoff [...] and decided I was not going to do any of that."
The first two issues of Marville are a broad superhero parody focused on Kal-AOL , a visitor
from the future who tries to become a superhero. But with issue #3 , the story really goes
off the deep end — as what little plot the reader is given disappears completely and
the characters go on a journey to the dawn of time. Apparently, this all happens so the
comic's writer-editor Bill Jemas can put his cranked-up theories about the origins of life
in the mouth of God himself.
As if that wasn't self-important enough, #6 has Kal-AOL recap the series in the form of
a sales pitch to an unseen editor, who agrees that Jemas' crackpot ideas could bring about
world peace. Sadly, they'll never sell, because the sheeple just want to read about superheroes
beating each other up. And then, like the world's worst party guest, Marville just straight-up
refuses to leave. This six-issue miniseries goes on to a seventh issue, with submission
guidelines for yet another forgotten failure: Jemas' short-lived revival of Epic Comics.
How do you sell a book like this? As it turns out, the covers didn't even try, instead featuring
allegedly sexy art by Greg Horn of a woman who never appears in the book, getting more
and more undressed as the sales dropped lower.
The writing was on the wall for Marvel imprint Epic Comics when it launched with Trouble.
The idea was sound — American comics had largely ignored the female half of their audience
since the romance genre went out in the '80s, so why not revive it for a new generation?
But the execution was doomed from day one.
To appeal to teen girls, editor Bill Jemas tapped Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar, whose
primary audience was the kind of edgy teen boys that teen girls normally avoid. Predictably,
he went as over the top with the sex as he normally does with violence, leeringly chronicling
the over-the-top erotic lives of teenagers named May, Ben, Mary, and Richard.
If those names sound familiar, well, there's the other problem. The series was heavily
hinted to be a Spider-Man prequel, which means Marvel expected readers to get invested in
the love life of Spidey's Aunt May.
"What the f-"
Worse, the series introduced a major rewrite of the superhero's secret origins that writers
and fans have wisely ignored ever since. May cheats on Ben with a whole bunch of people,
including Richard, and he and Mary end up raising little baby Peter as their own. That's
right, Spider-Man's aunt is really his mother! This soap opera twist didn't help the series
much, and it flopped so hard it took almost a decade before Marvel would reprint it.
The Ultimate Universe was the farthest thing from a forgotten failure. But ten years into
its existence, this new line of updated heroes wasn't so new and up-to-date any more. The
Ultimate line needed a shake-up, and it got one in Jeph Loeb and David Finch's 2009 Ultimatum
miniseries. But instead of opening up new possibilities, the series closed off existing
ones, killing off so many characters that there were hardly any left to write about.
Ultimatum only begins to makes sense in light of the then-contemporary torture fad in horror
movies, because it's kinda like a superpowered Saw. The plot follows Magneto as he decides
to wipe out humanity for good, but this is basically just a thin excuse to kill off character
after character.
Some of their exits are insultingly offhanded. Others are so gory they're like a parody of
"adult" comics. The Wasp gets eaten alive. Dr. Strange appears for all of two pages to
fight a bad guy who has nothing to do with the main plot, just so we can see the Sorcerer
Supreme's head turn purple and explode. Even when the story seems to be over, Loeb adds
an epilogue with little purpose but to add Cyclops and Dr. Doom's deaths onto the pile.
Fans weren't impressed, of course, and Ultimatum ultimately lost tens of thousands of readers
by the end of its five-issue run.
Not every failure is deserved, however, and it's a tragic fact that many great comic book
characters and stories have been consigned to the footnotes of history. Plenty of Marvel
series have come and gone over the years without ever selling enough to sustain themselves,
no matter how cleverly written or beautifully drawn they were. And that was the fate of
Thor: The Mighty Avenger.
The series brought in the iconic writer Roger Langridge to create new adventures for Thor
without all the baggage of his decades of continuity. He came back with an origin story
focusing on Thor's struggle to return to Asgard and his romance with Jane Foster. Chris Samnee
took on art duties, creating expressive characters and inventive designs for new versions of
classic Marvel characters.
But even the hype of Marvel's first Thor movie wasn't enough to keep the book afloat. It
ended after less than a year, and the final issue suggests the creative team had little
notice — since it concludes without answering the story's most pressing questions. Tragically,
Roger Langridge hasn't worked for Marvel since.
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